Yeah, that's right, the day after (ever see that movie? Reagan was going to kill us all in a nuclear war with Russia, but if you lived in Kansas, apparently you were especially fucked. What a comforting thought to a middle schooler like me...then of course there was that Pink Floyd song off the Final Cut about watching two suns in the sunset. Ok, I'm digressing...). At the time Andrew was barreling toward the FL coast, I had a choice of where I could hunker down and face the storm. It was frosh orientation week at U of Miami, and I didn't have to be in my on-campus apt. right away. However, I knew that all of my apt-mates would be coming down on the first day they were allowed to move in, just to get settled and reacquainted with school. Andrew was at a pretty high latitude, but it was steering straight towards S. FL. Conventional wisdom says the storm should have turned north at least a little, and I tried to tell my mom that if Andrew was going to hit FL, then I would be safer in one of the campus' 12 story concrete dorms than I would be in our wood frame house in Vero Beach. She bought into my pleadings and drove me down to Miami, dropping me off against all common sense in the very spot the category five hurricane was headed straight towards. Later she told me that the drive home in traffic ended up being a seven hour drive due to evacuation traffic (it should have taken her only three hours on a normal day).

Dropped off in Miami with my hurricane survival supplies (jugs of water, flashlight, candy bars and other items that didn't have to be cooked, and our naivete, which of course would be enough to see us through), we made our hurricane preparations by putting our boxes of stuff in the apartment's big closet. My mates wanted to see the storm through in the apt, but I thought they were nuts, so I asked a good friend if I could stay in his dorm on the 12th story of my old dorm building. I knew that there at least I would be in a place with lots of people in case something bad happened. Also, all the dorms had hurricane shutters which was a bit comforting. That night, I settled down alone with my bottle of peppermint schnapps (ick!) and watched the local news getting quite a buzz as I watched the storm continue its track straight for us. By about midnight the storm was hitting the Bahamas and was heading straight for us still, the feeder bands were beginning to lash us and through the windows I could see the trees (and buildings it seemed) swaying in the wind and the rain pounding on the windows. It passed the bahamas around 2:30 am, and all tv signals went out, so I had to switch to my radio. Still it was headed straight for us, and already we were getting lashed by hurricane force winds. The winds were howling so much that I decided to close my hurricane shutters. I had heard stories of people opening hurricane shutters and having the pressure difference cause their windows to explode, but I was too curious, so I opened the windows back up to look outside for one last time. Through the darkness, I could see nothing but rain and hear nothing but wind. I closed the hurricane shutters for the last time. Not long after that we were all in darkness, my buzz was waning, and there was no radio, no tv, just darkness and this horrible howling sound like all the winds of pandemonium outside circling the building. One could almost imagine the building walls shaking.
It was about 4:30 am when the RA and other autocrats forced us out into the hallways where we might have been safer if the whole building should collapse. I brought out my pillows and blankets and tried to rest, but I didn't want to sleep. I didn't want to miss any of it. I had secretely hoped when I convinced my parents to bring me down to Miami that I would be in the middle of the most powerful hurricane ever known to S. FL. I felt that this was a once in a lifetime experience, and one I wanted to face on my own.

All around me were mostly freshmen and some parents who couldn't make it out of Miami airport in time or had flights planned for the coming days. Everyone was quiet, so that those who wanted to sleep could, plus, we all wanted to hear it...but of course, how could you not? All I was conscious of was the constant howling that surrounded us and reverbrated through the hallways. By five thirty I was drifting in and out of consciousness with the rest of the student body. We had been getting pummeled for an hour and there was a kind of peace to the deep, hollow sound everywhere around us. By seven, the winds had died down considerably and although it was almost pitch black in the hallways, it was light outside the RA said. We were told we could return to our rooms, but that we couldn't leave the building until it was safe to go outside.

Well, I was having none of that. After all, I was a senior. Fuck getting herded around like a freshman. As the hallway cleared and everyone opened their hurricane shutters to see what little they could see of the campus from their tiny dorm windows, I made my plan to escape. I knew the stairwell was my only hope. All the other exits were guarded, so to speak, but there was a chance that they would ignore the obvious. So, after about an hour of contemplation and getting up the nerve, while no one was looking I locked the door to my friend's dorm and quietly entered the stairwell. As I passed each floor, I tried to imagine what I would see if I was able to escape the dorm. Was my apartment still there? Were my apartment mates ok...or even alive? I came to the bottom of the stairwell. The door had blown open and water was an inch deep on the concrete floor. I began to dread my decision...did I really want to know? But the same desire that made me talk my parents into bringing me down to Miami hopefully to be caught in the heart of the storm, that fatalistic curiosity made me walk through the stairwell door.
As cliched as it may sound, I use this phrase because it is exactly what came to mind when I walked outside and wandered across the campus: stepping outside was like walking onto another planet...I was on a different earth, a landscape chaotic and mangled with a different sky, that in its swirling bands of clouds and gusting winds mirrored the chaos and destruction visible everywhere on the ground. I became convinced that those really were the winds of Pandemonium I had heard in the early morning hours as the power shut off and we were plunged into darkness.

Our campus had been a tropical paradise...palm trees grew everywhere and huge 100 year old Banyan trees with all their myriad of roots stood like tangled iron anchored in the soil. Over the years as hundreds of Floridians lost their pet parrots, a wild population formed, and I used to watch them green and chirping, gathered in the treetops of the oaks and banyans. As I walked around the campus that morning though, still experiencing tropical storm force winds in gusts, I heard no birds and saw that not a single tree on our campus was left untouched or even standing. I walked the path I would be taking to class that year, the path I had taken since coming there as a freshman in '89, and the first clump of palms and banyans I came to (what used to be a shady place by the lake to stop, pause, lay down and read or sleep or play an instrument, make an architectural drawing, or talk with a friend), that first clump of palm trees was completely uprooted and tossed about the grass, or over the path in sections, and the big banyan tree with its myriad of roots dangling in the air, hung upside down still desperately clinging to the earth but otherwise half of it was bent over into the lake.

That was the scene everywhere. Every landmark that had once stood on that campus that was of any living thing was either gone or ripped apart. There wasn't a tree that a branch left unbroken, or a palm with a frond left unsnapped. In front of the architecture and biology/chemistry buildings had been a beautiful circular fountain inset into a geometrically square forest of queen palms. It was front and center on just about every mailing the university ever sent me. You would see it on commercials during the football games, you would see it on postcards and course schedules and handbooks and on stationary. That morning the fountain was just a dirty pool with battered and uprooted palm trees haphazardly tossed into it, criss-crossing each other in an impossible array of tangled trunks. It was as if some bored giant child had picked them up one by one and broken their trunks like twigs, then tossed the flinders about as he lost interest with his broken toy and uprooted another one, over and over until there was nothing left to break or to play with.

Having made my trip around the campus and wondering how they would ever open up for classes again, I noticed that there were already sounds of chainsaws in the air, and campus handymen were already going through the beginnings of their hurricane contingency plans, cutting down every branch that hadn't been ripped off the oak trees around campus. There weren't many of them, and I knew that their work would be long and hard and take weeks. I headed over to my apartment, and as I approached the part of campus that held our old army barracks turned student housing. I saw that the grass was not only covered in sticks and branches, but also roofing material...tiles everywhere like large chunks of confetti. Many of the buildings had at least one window out, I could see. As I looked up to ours on the third floor of a three-story building overlooking the (my) sand volleyball courts, I saw that we, too, had lost a window, but otherwise the building still stood. In the grass, just beyond our balcony and the concrete base, a huge oak branch with several smaller branches and all its leaves lay ominously at my feet.

Glad to be in the place that I had first called home the day before, I climbed the stairwell to the front door and knocked. Neal opened the door bleary-eyed, apparently he had been sleeping. I saw that they had mattresses on the living room floor and water was all over the carpet by one window that had been blown open and the tile in the dining area where another window had shattered. Neal told me that they had barricaded themselves in the hallway with the mattresses when the hurricane hit. Neal said it was so loud they couldn't hear each other talk, not just because of the wind, but because the huge windows on either side of the living room and the front door rattled all night as if they were going to burst open. He said that something had been thumping against the front door for a short time that seemed like it would break it down, so I told him about the branch that was on the ground not far from the balcony. We figured that the branch must have been blown into the balcony and gotten wedged in the curly concrete patterns of the balcony wall and banged against the door until it dislodged.
Apparently at some point in the evening, one of the windows in front of the living room had given away and the pressure difference created caused the one directly opposite it by the dining area to shatter. They only heard it as a loud noise from behind their barricade and thought the front door must have been blown open. Apparently, at that point, it was so loud inside the apartment with the windows blown open, that they had no idea exactly what was going on behind their barricade. They wouldn't peek for fear of having shards of glass fly into their face. They just hoped something would still be left. Of course, everybody survived ok, and nothing got sucked out of the apartment, but everything in the living had gotten a good soaking before I got there, and continued to get one through most of that day.

Of course power was out and there was no running water and the campus was full of students and parents, so there was quite an emergency on the campus' hands. Fortunately, they were prepared very well to handle the situation, and by that evening, I had my first meal outside the cafeteria, prepared by cafeteria workers and volunteers with what gas equipment they could muster. We all sat outside and ate, students and parents, feeling somewhat like refugees, knowing of course that school would not be starting on time (if there would even be a semester at all!) but not knowing how or if we would be able to get home.
Back at the apartment, we used our water sparingly. To take a shower we would get a pan and fill it with water, dunk a cloth into it and wash ourselves, then pour what was left over us to rinse off. To use the toilet, we would have to refill the tank with more of our water. We were'nt sure if we were going to have enough to last. Some of us, including myself, knew that we would be stuck in the apartment for at least a few days. I called my parents up and they said they wouldn't be able to come get me for three days because of work. I was glad because I wanted an adventure. There was a strange quiet about the place that night as we went to sleep and slept very, very soundly.

The next day, when we woke up we found that not only did we have running water, but we also had electricity coming into our building. So much for the adventure. What was bizarre was that the adjacent building, connected to ours by our shared balcony, didn't have either of those luxuries. (Later on we found out that ours was the only building on campus and one of the few in the area, period, that had either running water or electricity for the first three days! How lucky!) So, we generously let our neighbors (all good friends of ours) take showers in our apartment and strung extension cords across the balcony so that they could share the benefits of electricity, which meant watching tv to see what had happened to our city...all of that which is now part of the history books...the storm surge that rushed through people's beach houses up to six to eight feet high from the marks left by the water in some buildings...the absolute flattening of Homestead by tornados spawned withing the eye wall...trees thrust through houses killing a few unfortunate people, etc.

That day we went shopping. Yes, amazingly the drug store across the street was open for business, and we bought supplies like water and chips and cookies and such. Afterward, we defied local authorities and went on our little joyride to survey the damage. Driving through Coral Gables, many streets were still blocked off by fallen trees and people were out, braving the danger of fallen power lines, using chainsaws to section off the countless fallen trees. It amazed me how many huge and ancient banyan trees had been torn out of the ground. I remember one image of one that was leaning at a thirty degree angle to the ground with all the sod of the entire lawn lifted up and hanging onto the roots in the air like a huge green tent. There was another banyan that was sitting in the second second story bedroom of a very well to do Coral Gables' family. Everyone suffered from Andrew, but although the once neat and tidy Coral Gables was now a twisted and tangled forest of uprooted trees, fallen power lines and streetlights strewn across the streets all caused by 160 mph gusts of wind, the destruction I witnessed was nothing like what we all saw of Homestead on TV.

Driving around Miami, everything was surreal. People were suddenly happy??...they were waving in the streets, smiling??...at intersections where streetlights were laying on the street or hanging inoperable people were actually stopping and conducting themselves as they would at a four way stop??...and there were so few cars on the road on a weekday in Miami...unreal...US1 deserted, businesses vacant and no looters. Although we didn't drive down to Homestead (we didn't want to interfere or get in the way of relief efforts), we did drive south on US1 far enough to see all those hundreds and thousands of tall pine trees all bent a good 10 to 20 degrees to the west, as I bet they still must lean today. I wish I had the pictures that we took a month later when the campus reopened. Wow.

So, most of the rest of my adventure was uneventful. Each of us boarded planes or got whisked away by relieved parents and taken home. We were told that the university would keep us updated on plans to reopen campus. Just in the four days that I was there, they had already made incredible progress in cleaning up the campus. Even the city was looking much improved by the time I left. Of course, how could it not have when every plumber, roofer, electrician, carpenter, etc from here to Canada who wanted some big bucks and time to play away from the wife and kids came pouring into the city. You would see them everywhere for months. I remember the national guard filled a whole section of the Orange Bowl at one of our football games, and it wasn't long after that that one of those guardsmen killed two FIU and one U of Miami student after getting picked up by them and taken barhopping. Very sad, but not the first students murdered in my four years there. I guess that Miami will always be Miami in some ways, hurricane or no.

I remember, too, how the campus looked upon my return...like it had been given a really bad haircut that it might never recover from. So many trees with sawed off branches or none at all. Palms standing like bare toothpicks pointing accusingly into the sky, all trunks and no fronds...our beautiful fountain still able to shower me with spray lying down and reading after classes but all that set in a geometrically square forest of toothpicks...I couldn't help but think of Baudelaire and his forest of symbols every time I lay there...

La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers

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At some point I guess, I have to stop and go to bed.